In the beginning, you don't have anyone to talk to, but after a while, you get used to it and make some friends.

Even if you don't understand English as well as the other students.

Jochebed Cervantes, Ivonne Tavera and Guadalupe Villegas, all eighth-graders at Burney-Harris-Lyons Middle School, know what it's like to be in the Clarke County School District's gifted program - what it's like to be three of only five Latino students identified as gifted at their school, even though the school's population is 23 percent Latino.

The numbers are a microcosm of the larger district, where Latino and black students traditionally have been underrepresented in the gifted program. The discrepancy worries parents, educators and community members who also note black students are over-represented in the special education program.

Across the district, black students make up about 54 percent of the student body, but they make up more than 70 percent of the special education population. They make up only about 22 percent of the gifted population.

Latino students, who make up almost 16 percent of the overall student body, comprise only 6 percent of the gifted population overall.

"It came up during some of our discussions - people were raising questions about why that's the case," said Talmadge Guy, a University of Georgia professor who co-chaired the school district's Multicultural Task Force for more than two years. "Part of the concern was the over-representation in special education and the question if, perhaps, special education was being used as a tool to deal with behavior and other problems, rather than as an educational issue."

The numbers are no surprise to educators and administrators in the district, where the problem has been recognized for years. The question is how to fix the numbers in a school system dealing with poverty and how it can hobble student development, an educational structure that's only beginning to measure non-traditional markers of creativity and intelligence, and a culture that's come to see special education as the best way to get help for - and with - students who are struggling in classes.

Learning differently

Although numbers are still low, administrators have had some success in increasing minority representation in the gifted program as they begin to use alternate measures of ability and creativity in place of, or in addition to, traditional standardized tests. Despite the low number of Latino students in the program, this year's numbers are 50 percent higher than last year's, said Vicki Krugman, director of gifted education and the English for Speakers of Other Languages program. The number of black students increased by 4 percent over last year, as did the number of multiracial students, Krugman said.

The increase parallels a growing use of "alternate assessments" now allowed by the state Department of Education that let teachers and counselors look at other criteria for determining gifted students, including portfolios on varied themes such as art or science and tests that rely on non-verbal exercises, such as math problems or recognizing and building patterns. Children as young as first grade have turned in portfolios, including one student who made comparisons of technique between his own artwork and major artists, Krugman said.

The alternate assessments help sidestep some of the variables of poverty, language, culture and gender that have kept educators from recognizing the abilities of minority students in the past.

"You have to know your kids," said Letty Fitch, who works with teachers at Coile Middle School to provide enriched instruction for gifted classes. "You have to know what kids are bringing into the classroom."

Though Coile's student population is more than 25 percent Latino, the school only has four Latino students in its gifted program, all boys. About half of the school's gifted students are black, although 62 percent of the student population is black.

Those are numbers that worry Fitch and Principal Tim Jarboe. They also worry about potential bias built into the standardized tests that measure achievement and mental ability, but they acknowledge there's little they can do about that on the school or even the local district level. The alternate assessments give them hope that more of their students will be identified as gifted, however, and the assessments echo different learning and evaluation exercises being used not only at Coile but across the school district.

Assessing differently

It's important to use more than traditional pencil and paper to test students, if you want to figure out how smart they really are, Jarboe said.

While district officials are reluctant to generalize examples to particular races or cultures, storytelling - one traditional gauge of a student's creativity - can take different forms for black students than white students, they said. While some teachers have relied too heavily on stereotypical "raps" to draw out creativity in the past, many students have a gift for oral storytelling that's not recognized in traditional written exercises, Fitch said. Some cultures create stories that are left open at the end, rather than reaching some kind of closure.

Teachers also can be misled by behavior. Teachers who've traditionally seen gifted students as leaders in the classroom - those who raise their hands, volunteer information and influence class discussion - must be aware that in some cultures, respect for teachers and authority figures dictates more reserve from students, administrators said. Girls from some cultures are likely to be even more reticent, less likely to put themselves in front of the class, even if they know all the answers

While nomination for the gifted program is an open process - almost anyone can nominate a student for evaluation, including himself or a friend - students are most likely to be referred by a teacher or other school worker, Krugman said.

If a teacher doesn't recognize and draw out a student's abilities, potentially gifted students can fall through the cracks.

"I think we have to be willing to ask ourselves hard questions about why this is happening," Fitch said of the low minority representation. "It's uncomfortable to do that, and it gets touchy and political, but I think we've got to ask ourselves what's happening with the recommendation process. Because that's where we have some control over it. We have to understand how our biases come into play."

Fighting stereotypes

Stereotypes can be felt keenly by students, particularly when teachers underestimate their intelligence.

Jeff Blake/Staff

Burney-Harris-Lyons Middle School gifted students Ivonne Tavera and Guadalupe Villegas work in their Georgia Studies class recently. The two students are two of only five Latino gifted students at the school, where the population is about 23 percent Latino.

Jochebed, Ivonne and Guadalupe can try to persuade their friends to take the gifted tests and participate in the classes, but in the end, "it's up to them," Ivonne said.

Nevertheless, some are reacting to low expectations, Jochebed believes.

"I think Latino and black students have always been underestimated, and then they start to believe it," she said. "And then they wonder, why even try?"

Poverty also keeps some students from the kind of enriching experiences that lay the groundwork for academic success and entry into gifted programs, administrators said. Children who live in poverty are likely to be exposed to significantly fewer words every year than middle-class peers, which can affect language development and expression, leaving them behind in classroom reading and discussion. When tests are mainly text-based - as many traditional standardized tests are - students have a tougher time showing what they know.

While it's not the only factor, poverty likely contributes to the overrepresentation of black students in the special education program, administrators said. Poverty doesn't equal poor parenting, but the lower verbal stimulation poor children often face can cause developmental delays, said Pat Kennedy, the school district's lead psychologist.

The school district has seen cases in which children's IQ ratings appear to jump after being enrolled in a pre-school program for developmentally delayed children, Kennedy said. That's not supposed to happen, he said - and it's likely their IQ was never that low to begin with, they simply tested poorly because they lacked verbal skills.

Poor children in Clarke County are disproportionately black, and the poverty rate in Clarke County public schools is more than twice the poverty rate in the county at large. Two-thirds of Clarke County public school students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches.

Getting extra help

Teachers and others who work with students also are likely to see special education as a way to get extra help for students with academic or behavior problems - whether the students actually are disabled or not, said both Kennedy and Mike Blake, director of student services, which includes the special education program.

Kennedy calls a national overuse of special education an outgrowth of a "special education culture" that believes the program is a panacea for student problems. Blake tries to emphasize the importance of distinguishing between students who are disadvantaged and students who are disabled.

There's also a hazy middle ground - what Kennedy labels "close calls" - where teachers and administrators have to make judgment calls on whether to place students into special education, generally in situations that involve learning disabilities, conditions such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and problems with behavioral or emotional development.

"If you have a visual impairment, if you're born with a disability that's physical in some way - those students are not disproportionately represented," Blake said. "There's no judgment involved, in those cases. It's when you begin looking at learning disabilities, at emotional development ... I think a lot of times, people err on the side that this (special education) is the way to get kids help."

Unlike numbers in the gifted population, racial proportions in Clarke County's special education program haven't shifted in years. Northeast Georgia is under a federal corrective action plan because of disproportionate numbers of black students in special education programs, but the government has been able to offer little advice on how to fix the problem, Blake said.

Searching for a fix

Kennedy is hopeful a school district task force will find ways to slow the referrals of all students - and consequently black students - into the special education program.

Currently, students must be evaluated by a school-level "student support team" before they can be placed in the special education program. The teams were set up 20 years ago in response to a class-action lawsuit that demanded Georgia schools stop shunting disproportionate numbers of black students into special education programs - but the support teams weren't evaluated for effectiveness, don't receive any state money to support their work and don't seem to have had any effect, Kennedy said. The makeup of the teams - teachers, counselors, principals - isn't mandated and varies from school to school.

Envisioned as groups that would evaluate student academic and behavior problems, the teams help teachers find ways to deal with students in the regular classroom setting. They were envisioned, in fact, as a way to keep students out of the special education program as often as possible, but instead became gateways into the program for many students.

"Since the 1970s, there's been a way to 'help' kids, and it's special education," Kennedy said. "It's become an entire culture - you get smaller classes, special attention, you have special rights. But it's so overused - and part of that his how the student support teams have been managed."

A task force of school district employees has been studying what kind of help the support teams provide for teachers, whether they try multiple strategies before recommending students for the special education program and whether school staff understand their purpose.

Kennedy hopes that by taking a problem-solving approach, the teams will be able to help more students without putting them into the special education program.

"I don't know, honestly, if it's going to make as big a difference as we want it to," he said. "I think it can only help if we look honestly and clearly at the kids who are being referred to the student support teams and then on to special education."